JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Clearing out a closet, roof space or garage can be a chore. Old photographs, clothes and books can create clutter or take up space that sometimes is needed for something else. But every so often, the heirlooms or mementos that you find retain some value. If that's emotional value, it can be hard to part with them. If it's financial, that can make it easier, as Willem Marx hoped it would be with his childhood stamp collection in London.
WILLEM MARX, BYLINE: The attic in my London home is pretty tiny, and it's tight, enough space for a few boxes and some tins of paint. My parents demanded recently that my three adult siblings and I all collect our childhood possessions from their larger home outside London, that they're hoping to sell.
But scrambling around back in my small attic, I realized there was definitely not enough space to add more crates of, well, stuff, while my wife was adamant that my thousands of old postage stamps should be among the first things to go. I rang my mum to see if she could remember what these stamps, collected from around the world, had meant to me as a kid.
JANCIS HENMAN: I think it helped you continue a path of curiosity because you would think, ah, this comes from France, or this comes from Germany. And so you would then go and find out exactly where that place was, and you would connect them up.
MARX: Funnily enough, I've ended up in a career making those international connections and satisfying that curiosity, as a foreign correspondent. But I wondered, were some of my many stamps worth any real money? Could they tell me anything about my family's history or indeed the history of the countries my family comes from, especially Britain? I also figured it would be fun to find out.
I'm walking down a narrow 18th century alleyway in the heart of London to an address on the Strand, one of London's most famous streets, where Stanley Gibbons, a business that sells stamps, has very kindly offered to look at my collection
UNIDENTIFIED RECEPTIONIST: Pop it down on the counter there, and he'll be out in a second.
MARX: Thank you.
A couple of older enthusiasts seemed to be getting their own collections appraised already.
UNIDENTIFIED APPRAISER: It reflects the shrinking of the market.
MARX: My host, Oscar Young, an expert in stamps of the British Empire, soon arrived.
OSCAR YOUNG: Willem?
MARX: Hi. Yeah, Oscar.
YOUNG: Hello.
MARX: How you doing?
YOUNG: Nice to see you.
MARX: And you.
The inner sanctum?
YOUNG: The inner sanctum, yeah.
MARX: (Laughter).
YOUNG: You get to go where other clients don't.
MARX: We then squeezed into a small room...
YOUNG: We are currently in the process of moving things.
MARX: Oh, wow.
...Completely crammed with stamp auction catalogs dating back decades.
MARX: How long did your catalogue go back to? I see...
YOUNG: 1870s, I think, some of them go back to.
MARX: Wow.
And as I start to unpack my collection...
I have a box here.
...Young starts to whisk through it at speed.
YOUNG: It's part of my job every single day to have a look through these collections. And of course, any dealer, any collector that has real experience in collections like this can flick through them at a - quite a rate of knots really, just scanning the entire page and know exactly what they're looking at and know exactly what the value is for a lot of these stamps.
MARX: The stamps are arranged in album books, often in neat rows by their era, face value or country, and Young quickly starts to critique or comment on mine.
YOUNG: A lot of these are just very colorful, current, commemorative. You've got quite a few Dutch ones.
MARX: My father's Dutch, so it makes sense.
YOUNG: Ah, of course. Yes, we've got a few of the old Dutch colonies, going from New Guinea. I've seen some from the Netherlands East Indies, which, of course, now - Indonesia.
MARX: Stamps played a practical but also a political role in the very concept of colonialism, Young says, particularly for the U.K., with its monarch's face appearing at one point on a quarter of the world's stamps. The popularity of collecting stamps peaked in Britain around the 1950s, when one of my British uncles began his collection, and also at a time when Britain's role in the world began to change.
YOUNG: The empire was crumbling. The map of the world was no longer pink. And I think you've got older generations that were seen as a very bad thing. But also in the 1950s, you had swathes of new ideas and modern thinking. There is still some light from the sun that never set on the British Empire, that still beams around the place, whether it be through people's nostalgic memories or whether it be through the pages of a stamp album.
MARX: But after going through my albums, Young hadn't seen much that caught his eye.
YOUNG: So this sort of collection, in money terms, is in the under-50-pound bracket. You know, you're not going to be able to retire on this sort of thing, unfortunately. It's lots of little interesting things that are really quite common and that we see every single day.
MARX: Journalists try not to rely on just one source, though, so I figured I'd ask for a second assessment at another business not far away on the edge of London's Chinatown.
It's an amazingly incongruous building here, surrounded by the crowds and neon signs - small door with a small sign saying Argyll Etkin, an old collection company here in the heart of London. Hopefully, they'll give me some idea about what my collection means.
Hi there. Yeah, OK. Thank you.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: For you.
MARX: That's very kind of you. Thanks.
JEREMY BAHER: I'm Jeremy. We spoke on the phone.
MARX: Yes. Hi, Jeremy.
BAHER: Hi.
MARX: Jeremy Baher told me, Britain first developed stamps to avoid the problem of postmen going unpaid by the people they delivered to. And ever since then, he explained, scarcity or rarity has driven up the value of the postage stamps produced, including those printed, for instance, in a small region of Iran the British had occupied for just several months during the First World War called Bushehr.
BAHER: So we had a collection of Bushehr from that very small period when the British occupied it. I think it was maybe a couple of hundred stamps, but it was about 40,000 pounds because they're so sought after, and there's such a small, short period.
MARX: Such stamps for Britain's colonies were typically printed in London then shipped overseas. Some were so rare, they're today among the most valuable in the world, worth millions of dollars. Speaking of value, we moved on to my stamps.
I was probably 10 years old...
BAHER: Yeah.
MARX: ...By the last time I looked at any of this stuff.
BAHER: Oh, gosh. I'm not expecting too much.
MARX: No, I wouldn't.
BAHER: Sort of childhood collection.
MARX: Many of which are countries that no longer exist.
BAHER: And that exist - well, they still exist in stamp terms but not in reality. Not seeing anything in the moment. Ceylon and Sri Lanka now. It's all - no, I'm not seeing anything of any consequence.
MARX: I didn't come here thinking any of this would be worth anything.
BAHER: No.
MARX: But with a collection like this, I'm under pressure from my wife to clear up our house. Does this just go in the bin?
BAHER: Well, you could give it to a school club, where we send it to, or you give it to a charity shop. That's about it.
MARX: So the next day, on his advice, I mailed almost my entire collection to a school stamp club several hours north of London. I held on to just a few, printed to celebrate England's World Cup win in 1966, for my own soccer-mad son. Perhaps another 10-year-old will take as much pleasure from those stamps as I once did, learning about long forgotten countries that no letter could reach today. And you know, finding them may not be so much about making money but opening a new window onto the world for the next generation. For NPR News, I'm Willem Marx in London.
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